Se What You Mean

Abstract

Propositional attitude ascriptions raise important questions about what constraints a semantic theory for natural languages must accommodate, but ascriptions of “what is said” are thought by some to be semantically uninformative. Where past attempts to defend a semantically robust notion of “what is said” fail to meet several objections raised to them, I provide a way to specify semantic content through ascriptions of “what is said” by focusing on de se ascriptions, or as they are sometimes called: propositional avowals. For those that make such ascriptions, semantic content is fixed by the ascriptive immunity to error that avowals exhibit. The standard objections against a semantically informative notion of “what is said” are avoided by adopting a first-personal stance.